Monthly Archives: September 2015

As our school makes the shift to proficiency-based learning or PBL (aka standards-based grading), I am reminded about the struggles of big, systematic change. Changing a system is easy on the surface when you have a hierarchical structure. A top down edict is made and those below follow because their job depends on it. This kind of change often appears deeper than it actually is. Most people will comply with rules they don’t understand or do not agree with, but such change is fragile.

Right now we have teachers who deeply believe in PBL as a system that helps learners know where they are in their learning, where they need to go, and how to get there. Other teachers are open to trying this system and are starting to see the benefits, but are feeling the burden of the front-end work that the system requires (it is a ton of work). Still others are trying to fit their old system into the new one to have the appearance that they are complying with a administrative decision.

I’ve been in all of these stages more than once in my 13 years of teaching. In this instance, I am a teacher who has jumped in to the PBL water and has learned to swim. To me, I believe in PBL as both a reflection of the latest cognitive science around learning and as a system of agency and accountability for the learners we serve.

I am where I am not because of an administrative decision, but through the genuine struggles of my own action research, reading the research of others, and lots of trial and error (shout out to the poor students in my first iteration of PBL…thank you for your patience and honest feedback). I came to this because I saw problems in my practice that I wanted to solve.

Problem #1: My students didn’t see or understand the structure of the class and how to use the structure to help them be successful.

So many of our students physically move themselves from class to class. They sit down and do the thing that is asked of them and then move again when the bell rings. They go through the motions and likely struggle to see the point of it all. Teachers in the mean time, work to incorporate the science of learning, the science of engagement and motivation, and the art of incorporating the lives and thoughts of the young people in our class in creating a curriculum or lesson plan that is meaningful. Yet, many of us rarely share how all of these things went into our lessons with students.

This year, more than any other in the past, I am trying to make the structure and shape of the class more clear and share with students the art and science of it all so that their brains can use the structure to help them learn. With freshman in my AP Human Geography, the structure is more overt and teacher created, but in my Honors Women’s Studies class students help create the structures as we go and learn to independently assess themselves on their learning. It is the long-term way to practice gradual release of responsibility.

My freshman learned through this first unit how everything I create works to help prepare them for the assessment at the end. I give students a “student guide” (thanks Myron Duerck for this idea) at the beginning of each unit. This is essentially the road map for the unit and the study guide for the assessment. Each learning document we use in class helps students create pages in their own “textbook” to help them prepare for the assessments.

The brain is a lot more useful when it knows where it is going. Give your students road map.

Problem #2: My students didn’t understand how the brain learns at a deeper level and how to help themselves move through the levels of understanding.

Another aspect of my teaching that has changed with PBL is that I work daily with students to help them understand how knowledge moves from learning to knowing (from working memory to long-term memory). We often start class with a warm-up that is meant to connect to their prior knowledge or prior experience. We move from there to the recall/remembering part of the class–for APHG this is the terms we will focus on for the day. Then we learn to work with the terms using visual or examples and we end with applying the terms in a new way to see how well students understood them. I also formatively assess students at these levels to help them see assessment as a check-in or learning tool and not an evaluation.

I also ask students to create questions at different levels so they can start to use this kind of thinking when they review for assessments. So many of our students enter Lindblom (in 7th or 9th grades) with a belief that learning is memorized and then tested. Your intelligence came from memorizing and answering questions that could be promptly forgotten minutes after the assessment was completed.

In APHG all of our summative assessments are cumulative. It sends the message to students that the concepts are important enough not to learn just for one month and then forget, but that they can become a part of them. Students can literally own their learning and use it to learn more.

For my Women’s Studies class, I go even further and talk about the act of creating new information/interpretations to contribute to the world. Our biggest questions are what does this mean for me? What should I do/make/say with what I know?(With freshmen, we get there by the end of the year, with a lot of scaffolding and structure)

These kinds of questions and this kind of classroom model was influenced by my experience at the Educon conferences I’ve attended and through the wisdom and humility of the people with whom I work at Lindblom and follow on twitter. A special shout out to Chris Lehmann the principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. I am certain he does not know the influence he has had on my teaching. You can find more out about his amazingness here, here, and here.

Problem #3: I was working A LOT harder than my students (and, as a result, I was likely the one learning the most in my classes)

I know I will get a lot of “amens” with this problem. It seemed I was spending all my weekends and after school hours planning and giving feedback and planning and giving feedback. I was exhausted and did not get the full joy of seeing students own their own learning. It sucked.

My first shift away from this was in reading Robyn Jackson’s book Never Work Harder Than Your Students. It taught me to explicitly teach students how to practice metacognition and reflect on their own learning in order to improve. My students never had to do this because I did it for them. So when I passed them on to their next teacher or professor, they were still passive learners.

Now I make time for regular reflection and as the year progresses, students are able to identify where they need to improve and offer ideas for how to show me their new understanding of newly developed skill. They also learn how to study effectively in order to limit the amount of revisions and relearning they have to do. I think I used to see reflections as tangential instead of as a core part of the learning process.

For Women’s Studies, students are creating their own projects to show their learning and assessing themselves on the project (with my guidance and through conferences).

I created my PBL system to address these problems of practice and increase my ability to use assessment as a conversation starter rather than an evaluative end number or letter.

When we are making systemic changes, it is critical that we identify and largely agree upon the problems of practice we share and how the system works to solve those problems. Without the why of the system, the how is often another form of passive compliance rather than a transformative event.

My school shifted to a new grading system and new grading software this year. A number of us in the building had already made the shift to standards-based grading a few years ago, but many in the building had not. Last year, our principal announced that the whole school would be switching to what we have named Proficiency-Based Learning (PBL) for the 2015-2016 school year and, the week before teachers were to meet, that same principal took an amazing opportunity to help run the district.

So we arrived Monday for a tearful farewell and then promptly got to work on learning how to make this shift from traditional grading to PBL. To say it was messy would be an understatement. There were teachers in all stages of preparation having very different displays of anxiety–some shut down, some shouted out, and others mumbled gallows humor under their breath. It occurred to me later that we are experiencing the kind of anxiety and fear that our must vulnerable students feel on a daily basis. What a great gift for us to be reminded of this feeling first hand. I’m sure many of us, if not all of us, have created lives that very rarely push us to do things that make us feel uncomfortable or fragile in front of others whose respect we seek out. In this way we were freshmen last week.

I also connected our varied emotions to the PBL roll out to the system itself. It is a system based on on the fundamental belief that if we are learning challenging material, then not all of us will understand perfectly right away. Some of us will be further along because of our prior knowledge of the system and others will be just starting out. Our message to students in our system is that it is the learning that matters most, not the day/time at which you learned it. Similarly, if we gave a test to teachers yesterday on their knowledge of PBL and its application some would perform well and others would struggle on certain parts. It would not at all tell us how smart these people are, but rather it would tell us where they are in their understanding and application of the system. This is incredibly useful information. We would provide the supports they need to better understand and then we would check in again to see where they are.

Our system is based on Marzano’s 1-4 scale. Right now, some teachers are at a 2 (developing) and moving to a 3 (achieving). I likely started at a 3, but might not have developed as fast as they have and I remain at a 3 at the end of the week. It doesn’t matter that I arrived at a 3 earlier than others, it matters that we are all moving to our goal of a 4. In the classroom, the more students who move to a 3, the more the entire room rises and each person can improve the understanding and application of those around them. In short, I am better when my colleagues are better. I already see this happening in the kinds of conversations we are having as a staff. They are more focused on how students can show their learning and not behaviors and class rules.

If we are confident enough to be vulnerable in the classroom and talk about how our new learning helped us better understand the anxieties that students face every day and helped us live our belief that we learn as much from failure as we do from success, the young people in our care will respond to this and true community can be the outcome. I am excited to see it happen.

When I was first introduced to the work of Brené Brown through her amazing TEDtalk and her first book The Gifts of Imperfection, I kept thinking of its application to my students. Like most teachers, the classroom is never very far away from my mind and I am always collecting ideas and artifacts to bring back to them to help them make sense of their world. However, ever since she inadvertently entered the den of defensive teachers (rightly defensive in many ways…it’s been a tough few years) by saying that teachers sometimes use shame against students, I began to think her work would be much better applied to the adults in the classroom. I hope you will stay with me long enough to explain…

Some teachers have made teaching a job, they clock in and clock out. They do their job and go home. There are days when I deeply envy these people and wish this were just a job for me. For me and many others, it is a craft, a mission, a way to learn about ourselves…and so much more. Because of this, our ability to close off and compartmentalize is limited. Some teachers have told me that this is my greatest weakness as a teacher. A sure fire way to burn out and leave the profession.

This is the first year I have wondered if those naysayers are right. This is the first year that I wonder if my soft heart and passion for creating and sustaining a quality school will lead me to feel like a broken failure in the very career that I have given my life to. If it’s not obvious to you by now, I am really struggling this year. I love my students and still get excited when I see their love of learning emerge from their circled wagons of adolescence. I have some colleagues that inspire me daily to be both a better teacher for my students and better friend to myself. I have an immense passion for my course subjects (Human Geography and Women’s Studies) and love to learn more every week even if that learning never makes its way into my lesson plans. If I spoke this list to anyone, it would seem that I am full of joy and inspiration for my work. Yet, for some reason that isn’t true.

My heart hurts daily and I have a constant stream of fatigue and anxiety that at once puts me to bed before 9pm and wakes me up in the middle of the night. I am just now starting to talk about this to others. I am just now finding the courage to tell this story despite my fears of bringing those who care about me down and hearing “I told you so” from those who have been anxiously awaiting my fall. I had to start talking about it because I was stuck. I could name the emotions but could not find the roots on my own. I needed help…this acknowledgement is the first step of being vulnerable.

Which is what brought me back to Brené Brown’s work and its implications for sustaining teachers and building more wholehearted classroom communities. I think at the core of my anxiety are feelings of shame and a fear of naming those feelings out loud. I am going to spend the next blog posts exploring this in more depth and trying to find the words and the courage to write the words in hopes that I may find my way out of this by going through it. Perhaps it will be helpful to others as well.

The Gifts of Imperfection starts with this opening:

“Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth than I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.”

I am more than a little overextended these days. Though I have stepped down from various leadership roles at my school, I have taken on more challenges outside of the classroom. I have dropped so many balls in the last year (something that only used to happen rarely) that I am feeling like I am letting people down and representing myself poorly. The line above, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough” particularly resonates with me right now. I am also struggling with making connections to some students in my classes. In some ways, my students success last year on the AP Human Geography test has made me afraid I might not be able to do it again and I am pre-embarrassed about it. I am afraid of not being enough.

And yet it is my students who model drawing deep on their courage to tap into their vulnerability at an age where it is most terrifying. My poetry slam team wrote pieces last week on a moment when they felt vulnerable. The Gay-Straight Alliance students have pestered me endlessly (in a good way) to find a time and day to meet to champion issues we face at our school. My 4th and 5th periods are doing a poetry unit on identity and place and are sharing deeply about their pain. One amazing student wrote an op-ed that was published in the Huffington Post about the Illinois Gay Marriage bill. When I just stop thinking I need to be in charge and I just shut up and listen and watch the incredible young people who live with their hearts inside out, I am reminded that I have a lot more work to do to be their equal.